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Rewire turned 20. We marked the occasion by bringing together business leaders to explore one question: what does AI mean for the organisation of the future?
Rewire LIVE 2026 was a special edition. It marked our 20th year in data and AI, a field that has gone by many names in that time, from statistics to marketing intelligence to big data. Fenna de Meijier, our MC for the day, observed that 20 is an interesting age: old enough to have been shaped by two decades of experience, yet young enough for the opportunities to learn to seem endless.
Infinite learning loops
Wouter Huygen, Rewire’s CEO, picked up the thread. Firms, he argued, will increasingly run on a knowledge layer that keeps growing, fed by people and AI alike. Tacit knowledge is captured from employees; AI systems add lessons of their own. The digital and human sides of the organisation then learn from each other and evolve together (see figure below).
This was the crux of his argument. Anyone can buy a model. The advantage lies in the feedback loops – between humans and AI – that keep a system learning and adjusting, and that compound over time.
What Bol knows
Allard de Boer, director of data, analytics and AI at Bol, described how the company tries to stay ahead as retail contends with a stream of new trends, from social shopping to agentic shopping.
Pointing a model at a problem, he said, is the easy bit. The differentiating bit is the quality and usability of the knowledge layer: what the company knows, what that knowledge means and how it is codified. The results are hard to argue with. Bol has nearly tripled the accuracy of its recommendations, and has begun to experiment with personalised intelligence: Shophulp, its AI shopping assistant, has just launched in beta.
The practical bit
Rewire LIVE mixes expert talks with small-group, hands-on workshops, where attendees build an intuition for what makes or breaks AI in day-to-day work. This year there were four.
AI superusers. Wim van Roozendaal and Joshua Blokker of KPN, Wilbert Koop, Sanne van Schaik and Marije Gratama-de Reuver of a.s.r., and Jos Rasenberg of Hoppenbrouwers described how AI has become part of their operational processes and daily work. Just as important, they explained how their own input shaped the design and development of those tools. That reflects a belief behind everything Rewire builds: the AI use cases with the biggest impact are built for real users and with real users.
Agents behaving badly. Job van Zijl and Simon Beets tackled reliability at scale: how to keep agents trustworthy when the context shifts underneath them. Participants worked through a sequence of choices about what an agent should know, and found that decisions a human would consider trivial make all the difference to an agentic system. Trustworthy AI, it turns out, comes down to constraints, guardrails and transparency.
Are you the leader your company needs? This was the uncomfortable one. Leading with AI is fast becoming part of every senior job, whatever the function. Led by Laura Brandwacht and Ties Carbo, participants used the Wheel of AI Leadership to assess where they are strong, find their blind spots and decide where they need to grow.
AI experts and superusers share their experiences and explore the ramifications of AI adoption.
You’re too expensive for this. Alfonso Chacon and Rabiah Nasar-Ullah asked participants to pick a repetitive task they would happily never do again, then define, build and test a workflow to automate it with their AI assistant of choice. The target was half an hour saved every day. Ostensibly a session on productivity, it made a broader point: a few simple techniques go a long way once people apply them to their own work.
The day ended with a toast to Rewire's 20th birthday followed by dinner at Van Oost, where Floris van Straalen served a menu drawing on Japanese and French cooking. Nobody seemed in a hurry to leave.
Twenty years on
Much of what we now call AI went by other names when Rewire started, but many of the lessons we learned along the way still apply. Strip away the hype and the questions clients ask are refreshingly plain. What does AI mean for my organisation? How do I get value from it?
Rewire LIVE is our way of answering them: a hundred thinkers and doers in one room, working it out together.
For a flavour of the day, check out the video below.
